VEGETABLE POWER OF ACCOMMODATION. vel 
transplantation, and the most famous wines are capable of 
production only in certain well-defined and for the most part 
narrow districts. The Ionian vine which bears the little stone- 
less grape known in commerce as the Zante currant, has resisted 
almost all efforts to naturalize it elsewhere, and is scarcely 
grown except in two or three of the Ionian islands and in a 
narrow territory on the northern shores of the Morea. 
The attempts to introduce European varieties of the vine into 
the United States have not been successful except in California,* 
and it may be stated as a general rule that European forest 
and ornamental trees are not suited to the climate of North 
America, and that, at the same time, American garden vege- 
tables are less luxuriant, productive and tasteful in Europe than 
in the United States. 
The saline atmosphere of the sea is specially injurious both 
to seeds and to very many young plants, and it is only recently 
that the transportation of some very important vegetables 
across the ocean has been made practicable, through the inven- 
tion of Ward’s air-tight glass cases. By this means large num- 
bers of the trees which produce the Jesuit’s bark were success- 
fully transplanted from America to the British possessions in 
the East, where this valuable plant may now be said to have 
become fully naturalized.t+ 
Vegetables, naturalized abroad either by accident or design, 
sometimes exhibit a greatly increased luxuriance of growth. 
* In 1869, a vine of a European variety planted in Sta. Barbara county in 
1833 measured a foot in diameter four feet above the ground. Its ramifica- 
tions covered ten thousand square feet of surface and it annually produces 
twelve thousand pounds of grapes. The bunches are sixteen or eighteen 
inches long, and weigh six or seven pounds.—Letter from Commissioner of 
Land- Office, dated May 13, 1869. 
+ See CLEGHORN, Forests and Gardens of South India, Edinburgh, 1861, 
and The British Parliamentary Return on the Chinchona plant, 1866. Tt has 
been found that the seeds of several species of cinchona preserve their vitality 
long enough to be transported to distant regions. The swiftness of steam 
navigation renders it possible to transport to foreign countries not only seeds 
but delicate living plants which could not have borne a long voyage by sailing 
vessels, 
